The Expansion of Europe 1642-1789

Wilbur Abbott

• Editorial: Jovian Press
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781537811079
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia europea

WHEN in the last months of 1648 was signed the great peace which brought to an end the Thirty Years' War and with it the mediaeval polity which it finally destroyed; as the army of diplomats whose work it was dispersed to their respective governments, the awe-inspiring mass of documents which formed the fruit of their long labors might have led men to believe that Europe would hasten to enjoy the peace which she so needed and which her people for the most part so greatly desired. But whatever hopes of quiet were entertained, were already far on the way to disappointment; for the Europe to which the diplomats returned was even then altered or altering before their eyes and already shaping itself for new conflict. Scarcely a state of any consequence prepared to recruit its resources by the arts of peace; scarcely a royal house but faced a crisis in its fortunes; scarcely a people but was stirring in unrest or already engaged in revolution. So far from ushering in a period of peaceful progress the Westphalian treaties became the starting point for new and bloody rivalries...

THE EUROPEAN REVOLUTION. 1768-1789

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THE PERIOD OF A LITTLE more than twenty years which elapsed between the passage of the ill-fated Townshend Acts by the English Parliament and the final steps in the organization of the American colonies into an independent state, marks the last great turning-point in the long road from medieval. to modern forms of thought and action in the world’s affairs. Its most dramatic circumstance was, of course, the conflict between England and her colonies. But the American Revolution was by no means the only event of importance in those momentous years, nor the independence of the United States of America the only great result of the period. Seldom within so brief a time has Europe had the foundations of her beliefs and traditions so profoundly altered, or the longstanding practices of her every-day life so rudely disturbed. Had there been no revolt of the colonies this would still have been an era of eminent significance in European history.

On the continent itself the year in which the Americans finally appealed to arms was characterized by a series of events which determined for the moment many activities whose origin had long preceded the American revolt, and pointed to the future. That twelvemonth saw the final blow struck against the Jesuits, and the occupation of Ottoman territories by Russia and Austria which indicated the beginning of Turkish decline. It saw the accession of Louis XVI and his Austrian wife to the French throne and the inheritance of misfortune which it entailed. At the same time the enactment of the India Bill and the appointment of Warren Hastings as the first governor-general of India marked the initial step in the reorganization, and, as it proved, the extension of English power in the East. Meanwhile, James Cook returned from the second of those voyages which not only directed English attention to the Pacific and resulted in the settlement of Australia, but, by his discovery that scurvy, the curse of seamen before his time, could be prevented by means of simple changes in diet, added, as it were, a new realm to human activity. Finally, the passage of the Quebec Act began the modern history of Canada.

Still more than these activities in politics, the concurrent developments in the fields of art and intellect exemplified and contributed to the transition now taking place in the European world. In England, a great school of portrait painters, headed by Reynolds, Romney, and Gainsborough, achieved new triumphs in a remarkable combination of modest and graceful naturalness. Meanwhile, Greuze and Boucher and Fragonard continued the more sophisticated naturalism of Watteau in France, where the luxury and licentiousness of the court vitiated morals and taste alike. Continued by Reynolds’ followers, Raeburn, Lawrence, and the American Copley, the English “natural” school was reinforced by a group of landscape painters who furthered the reaction against artificiality, and contributed to the “return to nature” fresh sources of strength. And there is perhaps no better evidence of the feeling that man was now at last prepared to meet nature on at least equal terms than the increasing tendency of art and literature to depict her fiercer moods. It was sure confirmation of the fact that man was no longer afraid of his ancient antagonist.

The artistic revival was further strengthened by new mediums of expression. From the preceding centuries had come an art not unrelated to crayon drawing, that of painting in “pastel,” or dry color. It rose to eminence in the eighteenth century. Nearly every artist of note, from Watteau to the greatest of the pastelists, Liotard, tried his hand at it, and so established it firmly in the taste and technique of the continent. Allied to pastel was painting in water-color, which owes its origin to this period. This art developed from the old practice of washing in pen-drawings. By substituting paper for canvas, and achieving a variety of effects impossible to oils, it extended the field of pictorial representation in another and, as it was to prove, a peculiarly popular direction. For the moment it lent itself particularly to the genius of those last exponents of the expiring rococo style, “the painters of frivolity,” who, like Fragonard, devoted their talents to the delineation of beaux and belles, and amatory situations of the high society which for the moment led continental art in its train.

Neither graphic nor plastic art kept pace with the progress of painting, despite the encouragement of royal and noble patronage, the establishment of great galleries, new educational facilities, and the revival of classical models which had followed on the achievements of the archæologists. The genius of David, “the regenerator of French painting,” was, indeed, profoundly affected by this last influence; while that of Canova, “third greatest of Italian sculptors,” owed much of its inspiration to the same source. With the entry of such men into the field, the vogue of that school which catered to the patronage of the French court and was represented in the beautiful if decadent productions of Fragonard, began to decline. But with the death of Hogarth the talents of his successors were unequal to maintaining line-drawing at the level which he had reached; and though engraving increased in quantity, it was at the expense of its quality.

In another direction, however, not unrelated to general artistic progress, this was a notable period. Classical models in architecture, as in other fields, were still prominent, though a century of development had greatly modified their earlier and more uncompromising outlines. The eighteenth century had seen them adapted with much success to domestic building; and their influence had been especially marked in decoration, both interior and exterior. No small part of the principles known among Anglo-Saxon peoples as Georgian or colonial owe their origin to the last half of this eighteenth-century classical adaptation. In particular, the work of the English architect, Adam, typifies the movement of the time; not merely on account of the buildings which he designed, but because it was connected in his hands with another art whose development makes this period memorable. For, not content with building, he devoted his talents to furnishing, and so put himself in touch with the making of furniture, which reached its golden age in the era of the American Revolution.

This art or craft was influenced not a little by the passion for eastern, in particular Chinese, products, which characterized the taste of the mid-eighteenth century. As architecture was reinforced by the use of stucco, so furniture-making was aided by the introduction and improvement in finishing materials, derived largely from tropical gums whose names, varnish and lacquer, betray their eastern origin. The brilliant if unsubstantial grace of the styles developed in France under Louis Quinze and Louis Seize, and known by their names, owed much of their charm to the marvelous lacquer invented and used by the family of furniture-makers, from whom it derived its name, Vernis Martin. In England, meanwhile, the successive labors of the Chippendales, Sheraton, and the Adams brought the art of furniture-making to the greatest heights it had yet attained. In the work of such men was found a mingling of many styles and many influences, classic, Gothic, oriental, rococo, to produce masterpieces which have stood the test of the changing tastes of more than a century, and remain the models of elegance and sound construction. In such hands formalism was at once relieved and refined, and pronounced advance was made in a not unimportant and certainly an interesting and useful art.

In some measure and on a greater scale the same was true of another phase of human activity, that of music, which now entered on one of the greatest periods of its history. Though Handel had passed away, the oratorio continued its development, in England especially; while its democratic influence was now promoted in a different quarter and by different means. The work of the Italian Goldoni at once elevated light opera to the level of a high art and made it a factor in modern life. It did more. Drawing its motives and characters from the same elements which Molière had earlier exploited in the drama, it put the operatic stage in touch with every-day life, and strengthened the connection of music with the popular movement which was then influencing almost every department of human existence.

But it was neither in English nor Italian hands that there came the most remarkable triumphs of music in these years. For a century Germany had held high place in that field; and now Haydn, and still more Mozart, following in the footsteps of Bach, and in turn followed by their still greater pupil, Beethoven, pushed past all bounds hitherto set in musical composition. In their hands the opera attained new greatness; and with the elaboration of new forms of expression, the symphony and sonata, music was raised to heights of achievement and capabilities scarcely suspected before. Beyond even the triumphs of Gluck, who had done so much to bring German music into touch with the progress of opera, rose the glory of Mozart. His Idomeneo reached the highest level yet attained in that field; and when to these were added Don Giovanni, the Zatiberflöte, and the uncompleted Requient, and, from Beethoven’s hand in later years, the Choral Symphony, the world entered upon the greatest era of its musical history.

Besides her triumphs in harmony, Germany astonished the world in two other lines of human achievement. The one was literature. At this juncture, inspired in part at least by the translation of Shakespeare and the example of Percy and his colleagues in the revival of the older and more “natural” forms of literature, an amazing burst of genius suddenly set her among the principal intellectual nations of Europe. There the poet-philosopher, Lessing, who, with Diderot, had done most to foster a critical spirit in European art and letters, had been joined by such men as Wieland and Klopstock to protest against the classical decadence which had overtaken German letters. This “Sturm und Drang” movement, as it came to be known, bent all its genius to the destruction of conventionality, the tyranny of old forms and superstitions, and to encouraging the tendency toward the freedom of “natural” genius.

From that beginning came a new German renaissance. Herder, with his folk-songs, emulated the triumphs of the English school; and, following him, came the twin stars of Germany’s literary constellation, Schiller and Goethe. What Petrarch and Dante had been to Italy in successive centuries, what Shakespeare and Milton had been more recently to England, these two became almost simultaneously to the German people. Schiller, beginning with his romantic drama of the Robbers, proceeded through the medium of historical plays, Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, The Maid of Orleans, to his final and perhaps his greatest work, Wilhelm Tell. At the same time he contributed a history of the Thirty Years’ War to that form of literature; wrote philosophical dissertations, enunciating his creed compounded of mysticism and deism; and produced a body of poetry which has made him one of the most read and best loved of German poets.

Beside Schiller towered the genius of his friend, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the vast range and content of whose mind, no less than his literary powers, made his work not merely the culmination of German literary expression, but gave it a place in world literature. Few departments of intellectual effort were alien to his genius. Like Schiller, he began with romantic drama, in Goetz von Berlichingen. Like him, he drew material from history for his dramas, as Egmont, Tasso, Mahomet, and lesser plays fell from his pen. To these Goethe added two other forms; one was the drama drawn from classical sources, like Iphigenia auf Tauris; the other was that strain of sentimental romance which found voice in the Sorrows of Werther, and imitators through the whole German-speaking world. He had, moreover, a lyric gift unequaled in his native tongue, a breadth of mind and human sympathy which, joined to no inconsiderable scientific acquirements, made him the wonder of the European world of intellect. He was at once the representative and the highest type of his literary age. His translation of Gray’s Elegy, his admiration of Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, of Ossian, of Shakespeare above all, testify to the close connection of the forces remaking European life and thought. Moreover, Goethe contributed not only the most considerable impetus to the Sturm und Drang movement, but, in his Herrmann und Dorothea, and in his ultimate masterpiece, Faust, which only a later generation was to see completed, he gave that impulse to nature and humanity which his novel of Wilhelm Meister foreshadowed, and of which his whole life and work was an example.

If it were not enough to have produced Goethe and Schiller in one generation, with Beethoven and Mozart, Germany crowned the long development of philosophy since Descartes in this same period by the genius of Immanuel Kant. In him there culminated, and, in some sense closed, the era of critical philosophy; for his Critique of Pure Reason, with its comprehensive grasp of method and content, rejected at once the empiricism of the English thinkers like Hume, and the loose emotion of current German thought. God he identified with the general law of ethical necessity; and upon the reason rather than on the emotions he placed the responsibility for conduct. He denied the contention of the mere rationalists that there was any law of absolute truth, as he denied the existence of phenomena without relation to the mind that perceived them. For the abstractions of his predecessors, therefore, he substituted “practical reason,” and the “supreme cause” was to him a moral rather than a sensual force. In such fashion was joined the conflict between the realists and the idealists, with which every intellectual force of the period was concerned, and which, from this day to our own, has divided the intellectual and the artistic world. And though he had no intention to “humiliate reason,” he relegated it to a secondary place among the faculties. To him the basic quality was the will, and in this he combats alike materialism and spiritual dogmatism. Thus, as in the early seventeenth century the thought of Descartes gave a new basis of reason to the intellectual processes then stimulated by the progress of science, the last years of the eighteenth century were provided with intellectual foundations and formula to express the new concepts then coming into existence under the stress of movements which revolutionized man’s life and his performance.

These great figures of Germany’s golden age personified the highest intellectual achievements of their race; but theirs was not the Germany of Frederick the Great. The mild and peaceful culture of the courts in whose atmosphere their genius flourished, that older and truer Germany between the Rhine and the Elbe, bore little relation to the proud, warlike, unintellectual militarism of the Germanized Slavic lands of Prussia. Weimar, the “German Athens,” and not Berlin was the intellectual capital of the German people. Prussia, neither then nor later, produced from her own loins a literature or a culture comparable to that of these small but truly enlightened states. Like Catherine of Russia, Frederick the Great took France for his intellectual guide rather than the genius of his own land. Though these liberal powers were to be overwhelmed and discredited by Prussian might in future years, this overthrow of a German Athens by a Prussian Sparta was to prove more of a loss to the world, and to the German people themselves, than could be atoned for by any aggrandizement of the Hohenzollern dynasty. For with the triumph of absolutism over enlightenment, German literature, philosophy, and culture suffered in proportion as German material prosperity increased.

Into those higher realms of thought, whatever their great importance to the human race, most men have neither cared nor been able to penetrate. But to another series of phenomena which distinguished this period above all others in history they were not so indifferent. While the outlying regions of thought and action, like the remoter confines of European possessions, were thus stirred by new forces, at the very heart of every-day existence there were being wrought changes of no less significance and of far more immediate interest and importance to the masses of mankind.

Their first and most obvious expression was in literature. The Age of Voltaire and the philosophers had merged insensibly into the Age of the American Revolution which transmuted into action the doctrines which had long been at work remolding European thought. The great skeptic had lived to hear of the surrender of Burgoyne; and at the very moment that he made his final and triumphal visit to Paris there was signed the treaty between France and the colonies which recognized the independence of the United States of America. That circumstance gave a tremendous impetus to the principles of liberty for which he, with his fellow-philosophers, had long contended. There was no hand in France, nor in Europe, both able and willing to take up the pen which fell from his hands. For Goethe, with all his genius, had but a languid interest in politics or the controversy which delighted the soul of the great Frenchman, and Kant’s philosophy, even had it taken the form of liberalism, was as yet too remote from popular thought to affect its course.

But if French letters felt the loss of its leader, its spirit remained that of the philosophers; and a host of lesser hands continued the work of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. The salons of the free-thinkers flourished. The cult of the common man, of liberalism in religion and politics, was more and more sedulously cultivated; and a thousand circumstances pointed to an approaching revolution. Despite the labors of men like Prévost and St. Pierre, the prevailing tone of French letters was didactic and political. The latter author, indeed, opened a new vein of fiction with his Paul and Virginia, in which he extreme sentimentality of his time was blended with an extra-European setting to produce a new genre of idyllic literature not without its influence on later times. But it had neither philosophical nor political importance save in so far as it reflected the general tendency toward spontaneity and simplicity.

It was not without significance that this apostle of sentiment had begun life as an officer in Mauritius and became the superintendent of the Jardin des Plantes; thus typifying that connection between the various streams of activity which dominated the imagination of his time. Even more typical of that spirit was the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements des Européens days les deux Indes. This curious compilation, to which many of the group of so-called philosophers contributed, lacked real historical spirit. It was as full of errors as it was of declamation about liberty, the rights of man, and the current shibboleths of the school to which the author belonged. Yet it enjoyed a peculiar popularity, partly as the first effort to relate the history of Europe beyond the sea, and more largely as the expression in history of the principles of liberalism then being practically exemplified in America and becoming so fashionable in France.

But French literature, especially in history, yielded, like all European efforts in that field, to the labors of the English in this remarkable period. At this moment the British Isles boasted the three greatest living historians, one of whom still challenges comparison with any historical writer before or since. The first was the Scotch philosopher, David Hume, whose death in the year of the American Declaration of Independence removed one of the most distinguished figures of that circle which made Edinburgh at this time a principal intellectual center of Europe. He belonged to the rationalistic school; and his Natural History of Religion was one of the earliest efforts of that group to carry the conflict between science or philosophy and theology into the field of dogmatism and revelation. His contributions to psychology, ethics, and economics ranked him among the leading intellects of his time. His History of England, chiefly by virtue of its style, — for he was no historian in the modern sense, — had become and long remained the classic account of England’s development; nor with all of its bias and its inaccuracy was it without its merits for the days in which it was written.

Not inferior in style and infinitely superior in method to Hume was his countryman Robertson, who, in addition to his labors on the history of Scotland, devoted his talents to the same subject which had attracted the Frenchman, Raynal, and had produced the earliest of German colonial historians, — the doings of Europeans beyond the sea. It was the symbol of a changing age when British, French, and German writers took up the task of explaining to their countrymen the story of those regions then for the first time breaking away from European leading-strings. And it was emphasized by the appearance of another historical production from the pen of one, who, by his position on the English Board of Trade and in the House of Commons, had done something to precipitate that catastrophe.

In the year of the Declaration of American Independence there was published the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Inspired and informed by the labors of scholarship, antiquarianism, and archoeology which distinguished the eighteenth century, Gibbon’s work was peculiarly characteristic of the intellectual movement of its time and by far its greatest historical product. It raised English and indeed European historical writing to a plane scarcely reached since the days of Thucydides. For to a great gift of style it added scientific method, great learning, and a sweep of imagination which made it a literary portent of the time, comparable in value with the labors of the scientists and philosophers, and in popularity with that of the novelists.

With Gibbon’s work modern historical writing may be said to begin. It partook of another quality which gave it sensational importance and produced a whole library of controversy. Like his contemporaries, Gibbon was profoundly influenced by rationalistic thought, and at least two of his chapters, — those which ventured to enumerate the nonspiritual causes for the spread of primitive Christianity, — became the object of the bitterest attacks of the orthodox, and the prophecy of a new era of historical approach.

It might well be argued that the year 1776 is the most important date in history since the discovery of America or the fall of Constantinople, as the one from which the final stage of European revolution took its ...

Índice

• THE AGE OF CROMWELL. 1642-1660
• EUROPE AT THE MIDDLE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
• THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV. 1660-1678
• EUROPE BEYOND THE SEA. 1660-1678
• THE AGE OF WILLIAM III. 1678-1702
• END OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
• THE WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION AND THE REORGANIZATION OF EUROPE. 1700-1720
• IMPERIAL EUROPE. 1720-1742
• RELIGION, INTELLECT, AND INDUSTRY. 1700-1750
• THE AGE OF FREDERICK THE GREAT. 1742-1763
• THE AGE OF VOLTAIRE AND THE PHILOSOPHERS
• THE EUROPEAN EMPIRE. 1763-1768
• THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 1768-1783
• THE EUROPEAN REVOLUTION. 1768-1789